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Fabergé Eggs ARE Not
cheaper by the dozen

Back in Russia after many years' exile in the United States, Peter Carl
Fabergé's fabulous "Coronation Egg," presented by Tsar Nicholas II to his wife
at Easter 1897, has just gone on public display at the Kremlin.

The bejewelled egg, possibly the world's most expensive piece of decorative
art, found a new owner early this year, when Russian businessman Viktor
Vekselberg bought it from the wealthy Forbes family.

He was reported to have paid about 110 million U.S. dollars for The Forbes
Magazine's Collection of Fabergé eggs and other Fabergé objects. The Coronation
Egg alone was thought to be worth between $18m and $24m (that figure was an
auction house estimate; the precise amount was not disclosed).

"This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to give back to my country one of its
most revered treasures," Vekselberg declared.

The February 4 issue of Forbes Magazine reported:

Tsar Alexander III first commissioned the fabled eggs from the House of
Fabergé in 1885 as an Easter gift to his wife. His son, Tsar Nicholas II,
continued the tradition and the pieces have become a byword for treasures of
rarity and value.

There are only 50 Imperial Easter Eggs in the world, including the nine
sold to Vekselberg by the Forbes family. Ten are in the Moscow Kremlin
Collection, five are at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, Va.,
and Britain's Queen Elizabeth owns three. The whereabouts of eight are
unknown. The others are in the U.S., Switzerland and Monaco.

OCEAN TWELVE PLOT TO STEAL THE EGG

Warner Bros. announced [on April 21] that principal photography on
Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's Twelve began last week in Chicago. The plot...
revolves around the feud between Ocean and Terry Benedict. When Benedict
gets close to proving Ocean's involvement in the Vegas heist, Ocean decides
to carry out a bigger heist and pay him back.

He plots to steal the
Vanderspeigle Getuigschrift, the first corporate stock certificate ever
issued. This relic of the East India Trading Company resides in Amsterdam,
Holland. The second job takes place in Rome. The target is the famous
Coronation Egg...The film hits North American screens on December 10.-- Brian Linder, in
filmforce.ign.com

In the National Geographic News on April 8, Jennifer Vernon wrote:

Fabergé Easter eggs have been prized possessions of the wealthy for over
a century.

Crafted in the shops of Peter Carl Fabergé from 1885 to 1917, the eggs
were designed primarily at the behest of Russian Tsars Alexander III and
Nicholas II as annual Easter gifts for Tsarinas Maria and Alexandra...

Not all of the eggs were made for the Russian imperial family. Alexander
Kelch, a Russian gold magnate and industrialist, gave his wife Barbara seven
eggs between 1898 and 1904. The Duchess of Marlborough, formerly Consuelo
Vanderbilt and the wealthiest young woman at the turn of the 20th century,
also commissioned an egg of her own.

The Coronation Egg is the
best-known of all the decorative objects Fabergé made. This is how it's
described on a beautifully illustrated website prepared for an exhibition in
Wilmington, Delaware (US), in 2000:

The egg is enameled a deep gold hue over guilloché sunburst patterns and
blanketed by a gold trellis marked by diamond-set Imperial eagles at the
intersections.

At the top of the egg is the crowned monogram of Tsarina Alexandra
Feodorovna emblazoned in rose-cut diamonds and rubies. The date 1897,
appears beneath a smaller portrait diamond at the bottom of the egg.

When the egg is opened, the surprise fitted inside a velvet-lined
compartment is a removable replica of a coach of gold, enamel, diamond and
rock crystal.

Why did the late Malcolm Forbes spend millions of dollars collecting Fabergé
Eggs? Writing in 1973 he recalled:

When very young I read with horrified fascination an abundantly
illustrated volume on World War I. Its chapter about the Russian Revolution
and the massacre of the Romanov family included a picture of a Fabergé
Imperial Egg to illustrate the pre-War extravagance of Russia's rulers.

It always annoyed my father when a visitor examining one of the Fabergé
eggs would make an observation along the lines of "you can see why they had
a revolution--such decadence!" That the ultimate creations of the House of
Fabergé should be dismissed exactly as years of Soviet propaganda intended
was especially galling to the chairman of a company whose flagship
publication uses the moniker "Capitalist Tool."

Soviet "spin" not withstanding, Fabergé eggs were not baubles conceived
by a fawning enterprise dedicated solely to pleasing an absolute sovereign,
but rather the signature creations of a firm with ultimately more than 500
employees, four domestic branches and one overseas, as well as a catalog
operation.

The Forbes Fabergé collection also includes cigarette cases, photograph
frames and precious stone carvings. Sotheby's (New York) sold it on February
4, 2004 to the non-profit fund "Svyaz vremen" which Vekselberg set up
especially for that transaction. Vekselberg is a co-owner and director of
TNK-BP, Russia's fourth-largest oil company, jointly owned by Tyumen Oil Co.
and British Petroleum.

According to Forbes magazine, Vekselberg's personal worth is estimated to be
$2.5 billion.

The above story is a spin-off from an item in the May issue
of our e-book, Emu Egg Carvers Go Hi-Tech. which has just been
published by the UK foodzine Bare
Ingredients.

After writing that article, we wondered whether Peter
Carl Fabergé might have used ostrich or other eggs as foundations when
fabricating his bejewelled works of art.

So we emailed Christel McCanless
(Huntsville, Alabama, US) and Will Lowes (Adelaide, South Australia), of the
Fabergé Research Site*, and asked them if that was possible. Will replied:

No, very unlikely. Natural shell eggs would have been too frail for a
jeweler to use -- Fabergé used either hardstones such as nephrite, or gold
or silver. However, he IS known to have carved from such hardstones,
kangaroos, emus (a couple of superb examples are extant, including an emu of
a beautiful striated stone in the Royal Collection) etc.